The distorted notions of invisible things which Dante
and his
rival Milton have idealized, are merely the mask and the mantle
in which these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and
disguised. It is a difficult question to determine how far they
were conscious of the distinction which must have subsisted in
their minds between their own creeds and that of the people.
Dante at least appears to wish to mark the full extent of it by
placing Riphaeus, whom Virgil calls justissimus unus, in
Paradise, and observing a most heretical caprice in his
distribution of rewards and punishments.

--Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

I

The case of Dante provides an excellent opportunity to open up
the question of the Western canon. In one sense, Dante is the
perfect example of a canonical author. His name is one of the few
certain to appear on anybody's short list of the truly central
authors in the Western literary tradition. But in another sense
Dante can be regarded as uncanonical. In his own day he was widely
suspected of being heretical in his religious views, and a careful
reading of his works does indeed raise serious doubts about his
being the pillar of orthodoxy he is often taken to be today. Out of
this interplay between the canonical and the noncanonical Dante, I
hope to show that the issue of the Western canon is more
complicated than either its defenders or its attackers generally
present it.

In discussing the issue of the canon, it is important to sort
out at the beginning what we do and do not mean by the term. A
canonical work may merely be a work that has been accepted into the
literary canon, one that has become a touchstone in the reading and
teaching of literature. But the term canonical can suggest
something else, that the work is orthodox and somehow represents a
central authoritative position in Western culture. The word
canonical is so loaded with religious connotations that it
is difficult to separate the relatively neutral first meaning of
the term from the loaded second meaning. Dante is a case in point.
When people refer to him as a canonical author, they usually do not
simply mean that he is widely read and taught. Most discussions of
Dante today treat him as representing an authoritative cultural
moment in the Western tradition, as the supreme embodiment of the
medieval mind. Viewed that way, Dante becomes an emblem of
everything contemporary critics of the Western canon bitterly hate
and reject. The reason they feel that they must attack authors like
Dante and displace them from the center of literary study is that
these authors have come to stand for orthodoxy and thus seem to
enforce the hegemony of Western culture.

Critics who wish to champion various forms of non-Western
culture have a particular axe to grind with canonical authors like
Dante. The contemporary debate over the Western canon seems to be
premised on a sharp opposition between Western and non-Western
cultures, as if they were complete and irreconcilable antitheses,
and even wholly unrelated. One of the principal charges against the
Western canon is that it is Eurocentric, that it remains confined
within a narrow orbit of European ideas and beliefs, thus excluding
all other views of the world. A corrolary of the idea of
Eurocentrism is the concept of Orientalism, developed by Edward
Said. Said argues that throughout its history, the Occident has
defined itself in opposition to the Orient, basing its elevated
self-image on a debased vision of the cultural Other. In Said's
argument, the Occident views itself as rational as opposed to an
irrational Orient, as emotionally disciplined in contrast to an
emotionally uncontrolled Orient, and as masculine over against a
feminine Orient.

In medieval Europe the Orient was chiefly represented by the
Muslim world, and one does not have to look far in medieval
literature to find the kinds of orientalist stereotypes about which
Said writes. The French Song of Roland contains excellent
examples, but even the Divine Comedy seems to...

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